The rink.
The thought arrived with a jolt of something electric. Not a memory so much as apull—a physical, gravitational tug that originated in the muscle memory of my feet andtraveled upward through my legs and into the base of my spine, where two decades of skating had embedded the instinct so deeply it had become architectural. The back of Kael’s property. The outdoor rink he’d maintained since before we’d met. The one feature of this house that had made it, during the brief, bright window when things between us were actually good, the only place outside of a competition arena where I felt completely, unreservedly free.
Curiosity overpowered caution.
I navigated to the back of the house—through the kitchen, past the mudroom where winter boots lined the wall in a row of descending sizes that mapped the pack’s hierarchy of foot dimensions, to the glass-paneled door that opened onto the back property. I pressed my face to the glass.
And beamed.
It was still there.
The rink. Kael’s private outdoor rink—a regulation-adjacent rectangle of maintained ice that occupied the flat expanse behind the house, bordered by low wooden boards he’d built himself and surrounded by the bare-branched maples and evergreen hedgerows that gave the property its secluded, forest-enclosed character. The surface gleamed under the moonlight—fresh, clean, recently resurfaced, the ice catching the silver light and throwing it back in patterns that made the rink look less like a training facility and more like a frozen lake that had been tamed into geometry.
That was the one perk I loved about this house.
When things had been good between us. When the wordusapplied to Kael and me in a context that wasn’t qualified by tension or abandonment or the five-year silence that had calcified between our present and our past. During thatbrief, incandescent window, I could pull up at his house at any hour. Let myself in with the code he’d given me. Lace up. And skate.
Not train. Not drill. Not the focused, goal-oriented, coaching-directive-driven skating that consumed my days and structured my existence.Skate. The verb in its purest form. Movement for the sake of movement. Edges for the pleasure of the contact between blade and frozen water. The wind I generated with my own velocity. The silence that was actually silence—no music, no judges, no scoreboard, no audience—just the sound of steel on ice and the night sky above and the specific, irreplaceable freedom of a body doing the thing it was designed to do in a space that asked nothing from it except presence.
I should go check on Luka.
The responsible thought arrived and was immediately, enthusiastically overruled by every cell in my body that had noticed the moonlit ice through the glass door and had decided, collectively and unanimously, that responsibility was a concept for later and the rink was a concept fornow.
But I can’t skate barefoot in compression shorts at three in the morning in Vermont in November. The frostbite would end my Olympic career more efficiently than Garrison ever managed.
I looked around.
The mudroom. The rack of winter gear beside the boot lineup. Sweats—a pair of gray, fleece-lined athletic pants that were approximately three sizes too large for my frame but would serve the purpose of not-dying-of-hypothermia with acceptable competence. A long-sleeve thermal shirt in black, also oversized, also functional, carrying the faint scent of cedar and embers that identified it as Maddox’s—the man’s wardrobe apparently functioned as my de facto clothingsponsor for the evening. I grinned in small triumph and pulled both on over the t-shirt and shorts, rolling the waistband of the sweats twice to prevent them from descending to my ankles and turning a skating session into a slapstick routine.
And then I saw them.
The breath left my lungs in a single, compressed exhale that fogged the cold air of the mudroom and dissolved against the glass door.
On the shelf. The third shelf from the bottom of the mudroom’s storage unit, positioned between a pair of hockey gloves and a stack of puck bags. A pair of figure skates.
Myfigure skates.
I picked them up.
The weight was familiar. Specific. The particular heft of a boot-and-blade combination that had been fitted to my feet by a specialist in Burlington who had spent three hours measuring arch height, ankle circumference, and the precise degree of forward lean my skating style demanded. The leather was white—cream now, softened by use, carrying the patina of a boot that had been broken in through hundreds of hours of training and had molded itself to the topography of my foot with the intimate, personalized fit that only time and repetition could produce. The blades were John Wilson Gold Seal—the competition standard, chrome-finished, maintained with the meticulous, hand-sharpened precision that I’d insisted on for every pair I’d owned since I was sixteen.
I’d forgotten them here.
No. That’s not accurate. I didn’t forget them. I LEFT them. Deliberately. The day I’d walked away from Kael’s house for thelast time, I’d left these skates on this shelf because taking them would have meant acknowledging that the leaving was permanent, and some part of me—the stupid, hopeful, hasn’t-yet-been-taught-the-full-curriculum-of-heartbreak part—had wanted to leave a piece of myself behind. An anchor. A reason to return. The skating equivalent of leaving a toothbrush at someone’s apartment because you’re not ready to call it over even when every sign says it is.
And he kept them.
Five years. Through the injury. Through the silence. Through whatever romantic, professional, and personal upheavals had populated the intervening half-decade—the manipulative Omega, the rut blockers, the pack restructuring, the move to Olympia Academy. Through all of it, Kael Sørensen had kept a pair of figure skates on the third shelf of his mudroom that belonged to a woman he hadn’t spoken to in five years.
My vision blurred.
Don’t. Don’t you dare cry over a pair of skates. You have cried enough in the last forty-eight hours to fill the rink outside that door, and you are not—NOT—adding to the total over a man who had five years to pick up a phone and couldn’t be bothered.
But the tears threatened anyway. Building at the lash line with the insistent, irrepressible pressure of an emotion that didn’t care about the rational argument being deployed against it. Because the skates weren’t just skates. They were proof. Physical, leather-and-steel, you-can-hold-them-in-your-hands proof that Kael had been unable—or unwilling—to erase me from his space the way he’d erased himself from mine.
I remember the day we bought these.
The memory surfaced unbidden. A winter afternoon in a specialty shop in Burlington. Kael beside me—younger, lessarmored, carrying a version of his composure that hadn’t yet been reinforced by the accumulated weight of betrayals and pharmaceutical management. His pale gray eyes tracking the fitting process with the focused, analytical attention he brought to everything—asking the specialist about blade profiles and boot rigidity and the specific technical requirements of a skater who prioritized jump height and rotational speed over edge depth. He’d paid for them without asking. Hadn’t mentioned the cost. Had simply handed his card to the specialist and looked at me with an expression that said,these are yours, and you’re going to win in them, and I want to have contributed to even this small part of the journey.
